


For All To See

by Owlship



Series: Lifelines (Soulmate Fics) [5]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: (but not really), (sort of? i don't know how to tag this fic okay), F/M, Gen, Love-Identifying Marks, Magical Tattoos, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, could be platonic if that's your jam, everyone loves everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 02:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5726518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Up close, it was easy to distinguish a true heartmark from a common tattoo. You could copy the design perfectly but it wouldn't have the right vibrancy, the living sheen of something truly a part of one's self. A tattoo was just static ink, trapped under skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For All To See

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this tumblr post](http://v8roadworrier.tumblr.com/post/136665116751/breatheinimperfection-empressnacho-eryuko)! Magic tattoos that transfer onto your body when you fall in love with someone- not quite soulmates but I still dig it. :3

Up close, it was easy to distinguish a true heartmark from a common tattoo. You could copy the design perfectly but it wouldn't have the right vibrancy, the living sheen of something truly a part of one's self. A tattoo was just static ink, trapped under skin.

From a distance it was harder to tell them apart, from across a room difficult indeed, and when only ever seen through the scratched glass of old binoculars it was impossible. It was rare that the Immortan's wives were paraded out in front of the crowds below, but when they were- he made sure people thought they adored him, as they were meant to.

But Joe had long since given up on his captive wives feeling any shade of actual love for him. His mark only appears naturally on the most zealous of War Boys, those who devoted themselves to his cause in every way, and was burned into the rest, a corrupted symbol of ownership instead of a gift from true emotion.

The women Furiosa has sworn to steal away bear the raised dead-ink scratching of tattoos, Joe's heartmark stained unnaturally into their skin where it has no place to belong. Even the youngest, the Fragile with her delicate cage-bred inclinations, feels nothing close to the sort of love that would have truly marked her.

Furiosa remains glad that he hadn't been tattooing, back when it was her in white drapery. The brand at the back of her neck was bad enough, but none would mistake it for a heartmark. That honor went only to the gleaming mark that lies across the wing of her shoulder blade, the one tangible token she has left of her childhood beyond memories of green and softness.

Her own heartmark would be unremarkable where it sits curled upon itself at the center of her chest had it stayed there, a secret shared only between her and her initiate-sister's skin.

The thick war-paint covers it, but even the most devout War Boy doesn't wear paint all the time. Bath days, bleeding days, surgeries in the Skin Shop; after hundreds of days of riding and fighting together the tracery of her heartmark can be seen stamped among her crew, a damning sight that Furiosa has to turn away from.

It's not right, not fair. They were meant to be cannon fodder, in love with Death most of all, and yet. And yet.

The love that transfers a heartmark isn't always romantic, doesn't have anything to do with trading paint or the little families she sees form among the Wretched. But it's love all the same, the sort that inspires Furiosa's crew to put off their rush for Valhalla in the name of keeping the Rig protected, that sees them squabble with the quartermaster so she doesn't get sub-par rations, that causes Ace's face to twist into uncomprehending horror and betrayal when he realizes that she's not stopping as the storm approaches.

  


When Angharad falls and Furiosa orders the wastelander fool to keep driving, the girls in the backseat each cover a different spot on their bodies with their hands as they wail, reaching for the last place they will find her, now. She isn't surprised that the Splendid's heartmark found its way onto each of them; she had been magnificent, the sort of rare creature who inspired love and loyalty as easily as she breathed.

It doesn't make it any easier to bear the loss. Furiosa wonders if, had the woman been given the chance to bloom into the soil of the Green Place, she herself might have woken one day to find the silvery-black gleam of Angharad's heartmark somewhere on her body. But the mark would never appear now- love for the dead was as wasted as the torrent of water unleashed on the Wretched; a lure of relief that only gives way to fouled mud and addiction.

  


“It looks the same,” Cheedo says just quietly enough to be heard over the roar of the War Rig's engine, curled into herself and the Dag, one hand tracing the lines that are etched into the skin of her calf.

“Of course it does,” Toast replies, rubs unconsciously yet again the skin of her upper arm before bringing both hands back to the little revolver she was learning to field-strip and reassemble. Furiosa had shown her how, once the bullets were sorted, recognizing her need to have some tangible work to distract herself with.

“You can't even tell,” Cheedo says, voice thin and anguished, young. She is so young, Furiosa thinks, not just in days but down to the marrow of her. “What if she's not really gone? What if she's still alive, and we- we _left_ her?”

The heartmarks don't change once they appear, stay vibrant and crisp even after thousands of days would have worn a tattoo blurry and faded, even if the person who inspired it is long dead.

Fool makes a noise while he drives, head twitching as if he wants to turn and say something to the girls. He hasn't said a word since asking about the Green Place, hasn't seemed to take interest in anything but whether the rig was enough to carry them there.

“It doesn't,” he does say after a moment, surprising her, “They don't fade.”

Cheedo gives a sort of hiccuping sob, buries her face into the side of the Dag, who is suddenly furious once more. “How would you know, smeg?” she demands, lashing out with her words and drawing blood.

It seems obvious to Furiosa without going looking that someone like this wastelander has loved and lost, has only spoken because he knows too well how the marks stay. Fool makes another noise, eyes darting around the cab as if looking for an escape, his reaction if nothing else serving as answer enough.

“He's right,” Furiosa says, drawing the attention off of him. “Some of the Vuvalini have heartmarks that are tens of thousands of days old, or belonging to the dead, and they look as fresh as one newly-laid.”

Toast shoots the Dag a smug look, but the girl only scowls. Cheedo smiles thinly, a sad shade of the way she ordinarily looks when hearing of the Green Place, and asks quietly if Furiosa won't tell them some more about the place they're running towards.

  


The Valkyrie is just as Furiosa remembers her, for all that neither of them are young girls anymore, have spent their seven-thousand days apart struggling for life in such different ways. They had only just been old enough for their heartmarks to appear, when the raiders came. Now they sit together at the small cooking fire and Furiosa remembers how it once was, wishes they were still young and undamaged and it was safe enough to lay their heads against each others' shoulders, to see if they still fit together.

The girls are crowded around Forthright, listening to her tell outrageous lies of all the people whose heartmarks she bears, entranced to see someone who has lived so much. Toast seems to know they are being teased but Capable smiles earnestly as the tales spin, relieved to hear that many marks do not require heartbreak. She alone wears one for each of her sisters, and will likely have one for their War Boy by sunrise, the sort who feels deeply and often.

Fool sits a ways off, even less at ease with the gathering of people than the remnants of the Vuvalini are with having him there, eyes pensive as he keeps a twitchy sort of watch.

“You're sure he's earned a bike _and_ supplies?” Katawit asks, sending a distrustful look at the wastelander, “He's a cut-n-run if I ever saw one.”

Furiosa only nods, resolute. She doesn't know the how of it, but he'd killed the Bullet Farmer with barely any weapons- she knows well the wheel he'd returned with- and a feat like that was worth the bike they didn't even have enough of their own people to ride. The supplies were a trickier matter. They had water enough, thanks to the tank of the War Rig, and vegetation that had been intended for trade with Gas Town, but even if they drained the Rig's fuel tanks and hoped it didn't choke the bikes guzz was in short supply, and Fool has no sundries but what he already carries on his back.

“You're hoping he comes with us,” Valkyrie says quietly, not turning her head to look Furiosa's way, not quite accusing.

Furiosa hasn't told much of the story that brought them here, hadn't mentioned how she and the wastelander had tried killing one another- how she had tried to kill him, and he'd fired warning shots instead. Valkyrie's right to be wary, the man screams violence and instability, no matter how reliable she found him when the Rock Riders attacked, when the engines needed tending, when he could have taken the Bullet Farmer's car and never seen them again but instead returned with supplies.

“I'm going to ask if he will,” Furiosa says in reply. She thinks about defending the decision with practical reasons- he has useful skills, was strong and healthy, used to surviving on bare nothing. Instead she stays quiet and thinks about her crew, stamped with her heartmark and fiercer, prouder for it; how it had all meant nothing in the end when she traitored them.

“He _is_ a cut-and-run,” Valkyrie says, warningly, but then sighs and reaches so her hand rests against Furiosa's back, finger brushing the spot the mirror of her heartmark lies, unchanged after so many thousands of days.

He probably is, Furiosa allows as she sinks into the contact so sorely missed, but she intends to ask him anyway.

  


When she stops being surprised to still be alive at all, Furiosa spends a moment in private to be quietly surprised that there's no mark on her skin that she hasn't carried since she was young. She feels as though there should be, should be some tangible sign of the time spent working in unison and saving one another but there isn't, beyond the mundane scars of battle.

It doesn't matter, in the end, whether the feeling that welled in her as she lay clinging to life on the floor of the Gigahorse was the sort that earns a heartmark. Fool- Max, she is told his name is, given out like a lifeline to keep her tethered- is a cut-and-run just as she was warned, leaving again and again. He might return, though, as he had before, and it is that thought which stays with her as they focus on healing, on rebuilding.

  


You can't erase a heartmark. It stays and stays, rejecting ink tattooed over it, appears even through scars and burns and flesh cut down to bone.

What had once been a source of pride for the War Boys- the Immortan's own mark a part of their skin- becomes intense shame, anger, and they look for ways to be rid of it. There's nothing for it, really, but Toast is the one to set the fashion of covering it with thick black grease-paint, so even the shadow of it can't be seen.

Hers being just an inked tattoo, Toast has the Dag haul out Miss Giddy's tattooing kit and run over the scratched lines again and again, until there's nothing to be seen but an inky black circle. When Toast is satisfied, the Dag uses the tat gun to twist the shapes of her own, turn it into a part of the living history she's begun growing on the blank spaces of her skin.

Cheedo scratches and scratches, sometimes with determination and sometimes a mindless action, until bit by bit the ink is broken up, obscured by thin crisscrossing scars of her own making. Only Capable leaves hers alone, just covers it with clothes as she trades flimsy slave-white wraps for gear sturdy enough to work in, insisting over and over that time will fade it just as time will fade the rest of Joe's legacy.

Without paint covering them, it becomes easy to see the medley of marks on the War Boys. Where once it would have been taken as weakness they now proudly display what heartmarks they bear, melding with scars and tattoos until they look more as the people Furiosa grew up with, ones stamped with the signs of life. She sees her own mark here and there, remnants of her old crew and new, and it no longer churns uneasy guilt in the pit of her stomach to see the reflection of what she means to them but instead brings a wash of pride.

  


A hundred or so days after the Road and the fights and the leaving, a sentry calls out for dust on the horizon. Furiosa is near enough to the powerful telescope to take charge of it, assess the potential for threat. A single car, too far to see much details of but not painted with any tribe's symbol that she knows of. It moves fast, well-tuned, and then abruptly cuts the engine to sit completely still.

Could be engine failure, or a trap, or...

It's a ridiculous thought- a lone car could be anything, out in these wastes- but Furiosa looks down through the telescope and _knows_. There's no real way to tell who's behind the wheel this far out, and the sleek black car isn't one she's seen before, but there's an itch blooming to life on the curve of her hip and she realizes all at once why there was no new heartmark on her when she woke from her injuries.

“Just a stray,” she says to the sentry and moves away from the telescope, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, “I'll handle it myself.”

A true cut-and-run wasn't anyone Furiosa could love- and she'd known even as he bled into her that he was already running- but someone who returns... She pats the fading itch of newly-marked skin as she drives out to meet the car, wonders what shape Fool's mark will be when she has a moment to check. Wonders how hers looks, swirling darkly across his skin, not doubting that it's already there.

  
  


End file.
